On the plane to Kentucky for Christmas last year, I read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. For the first half of this reading, I was under the vague impression that it had been published in 2008. I found it tremendously enjoyable, and contemporary–a gay protagonist of color and strong female characters, China as the sole world superpower, a mundane and difficult life on a lunar colony–but with some irksome anachronisms, like the way the characters used their wrist-implant cyberjacks to make calls from pay phones.
Eventually I flipped back to check the copyright page. It came out in 1992.
Jesus Christ, Maureen McHugh, you were on top of this shit while the rest of the field was just starting to get boners for steampunk? I will be reading more of your books.
This is an easy test for determining premillennial science fiction from the postmillennial, by the way: the ubiquity of cell phones (and how big a deal the author makes about them).